Wind

On my back porch, an outside light goes on and off, on and off, as the motion sensor picks up the flapping of the patio tent in the strong wind before Robert goes outside to zip it back up. This wind, they say, traveled from Mexico, from Colima, where it began as the worst storm recorded in history there and is now dumping inches of water here in Canada. Think of it, a storm moving across a continent with enough water to leave behind in three countries. It reminds me of me, traveling across those same three countries, hoping to have enough good cheer to leave behind in all three. I look outside and see the pine tops swaying, see the leaves on the bushes show their undersides, see the grass shiver. I hear rumbles. But I can’t see the wind. There’s so much important stuff we can’t see. That reminds me of God, of course, and Jesus insisting there was more out there. Robert and I are working on some training sessions for missionary candidates, and so much of what we talk about is the invisible stuff, even invisible people, like the Samaritan woman.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus was sitting by the side of a road with a clay jar half-full of water in his hands. He was bright-eyed and making one of his usual outrageous claims. “Friends, I’ve been eating food you don’t know about.” His friends, you see, had just arrived with groceries and were getting ready to build a fire and make supper, but Jesus wasn’t interested. Even though they’d left him sitting on the lip of a well, drooping from weariness and thirst just a while before, he was now suddenly full of energy. The friends knew they’d missed something, but what was it this time? It surely couldn’t have to do with this empty-handed Samaritan woman hanging around all starry-eyed!

“Wake up! Look around!” Jesus exclaimed. “There’s a harvest all around you, and you can’t see it.” In another context he would add, “…and the workers are so few. Ask the boss for more!” Oh, Jesus could be so frustrating at times, couldn’t he? They’d been tired, too, but they’d dragged themselves to the store to do the shopping for him, and now this was the reward they got! Who knows what would happen to their supper plans now. I bet that is what they were thinking, because it’s what I  would be thinking. Meanwhile Jesus had teamed up with a discarded, adulterous woman to plant a fountain of living water right in the heart of a Samaritan village. Some people say Jesus’ visit to this village was the start of a Christian community there, a Samaritan congregation that followed Jesus as the Messiah. I don’t know this, but it could be true. It sure wouldn’t surprise me, Jesus showing his friends, single-handed, how to bring the good news to a person, an entire town, in fact, that had been discarded by his own.

How did he do this? The conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well seems so pitifully short. How could such a short interchange convert an entire village? I can’t answer this question either, but one thing he told the woman stands out to me: “The time is coming when it won’t matter where you worship, whether here or Jerusalem…” With these few words, Jesus opened the door for Samaritans to follow him without first becoming Jews. He laid his own Jewish culture aside so they could hear him. And when He did this, they recognized him as Messiah and followed him.

The good news that the Samaritans heard and that we take to nation after nation, culture after culture, is that God comes to live among us. That God sets his culture aside to rescue us. That God becomes a Man walking on our roads, drinking from our jars, and worshiping on our mountains. This is the meaning of incarnation, and when this particular Samaritan town got a taste of true incarnation from Jesus, they “came streaming from the village to meet him.” We get so entangled with our stuff.  It’s so much harder to move into a new place when we’re loaded down with stuff from the old. Jesus showed up empty-handed and thirsty.  Ready to ride the wind. If it had been me, I’d have come prepared. I’d have had a big bottle of clean water. And I wouldn’t have seen anything out of the ordinary.